Thornton Wilder (70 page)

Amos surely had himself, his brother, and two of his sisters in mind when he wrote, “More particularly such frustration is due to paralyzing inhibitions, resultant from Puritan attitudes and training.” Referring to Charlotte by name only in a footnote, he wrote, “The author last quoted has expressed both the oppressions and the struggle consequent on frustrations in this area in a series of ‘Monologues of Repression,' ” and then offered lines from one of Charlotte's poems to illustrate. In this literary exposition of his sister's “secret life” and, by extension, of a shaping force in his and his siblings' upbringing, Amos, the devoted elder brother, may have diagnosed even more astutely than Charlotte's doctors one significant root of her breakdown.

Charlotte's first book of poetry,
Phases of the Moon
, was stunningly unorthodox in style and subject matter; heart-wrenching in its emotional content, whether grounded in imagination or experience; and, in either case, portending what might lie ahead. Near the end of her book, in “(For the Two),” a poem about parting with someone beloved, Charlotte wrote,

 

. . . but in the heart, in the place of being:
what will become of me?
The years wheeled; spun in the iron hub, I was torn on the spoke-ends and standing aloof—the intricate ghost-ridden—knew nothing, felt nothing. Destroyed . . . or fore-doomed to destruction. . . 
.
²²

 

Her second book,
Mortal Sequence,
was by comparison sedate, muted, constrained—and, for the most part, conventional in style and subject. There are many instances of rhymed verse, of structure, order, boundaries, conformity. There seemed to be two poets—two Charlottes—foreshadowing the greater chasm in personality that was to come. She had written in 1936, in the defensive coda to
Phases of the Moon,
“At the close of the narrative suggested, we are left on the threshold of a future in which expanding experience, re-orientating the individual with respect to human relationships, effects a cathartic resolution of the particular conflict that troubles the pages here.”
²³
Unfortunately that would not be true for Charlotte.

In part the family blamed Charlotte's breakdown on Evelyn Scott, one of her closest friends, as well as her confidante and mentor. Isabel wrote to Dwight Dana, noting that Scott had always believed—unjustly—that the Wilders had neglected Charlotte and failed to support her financially. “Two years ago I feared and was prepared for this break,” Isabel wrote to Dana. “It had to come and we had to wait until it came; so did Charlotte, apparently. Now from bedrock, there is hope she can have a fresh start toward a more normal kind of life and especially, more natural and open personal and family relationships.”
²⁴

By mid-March, however, it was clear that Charlotte was gravely ill, and that her treatment would last far longer than thirty days. She alternated between euphoria and rebellion, going on a hunger strike. Her doctors told the family what they had always known—that Charlotte was an “unusually strong-willed type.”
²⁵
Isabella was relieved to hear from the doctors that Charlotte demonstrated no suicidal tendencies. She was well enough on April 22 to write to Amos herself, and by early May Isabella and Isabel believed that Charlotte seemed completely normal.

 

THORNTON HAD
for years been the financial head of his family, and that role would irrevocably expand and solidify as Charlotte's illness progressed. With Charlotte incapacitated, Janet newly married and on her honeymoon, Thornton in South America, and their mother now growing more and more anxious about Charlotte's health and the accelerating cost of her treatment, Isabel, by default, began to pick up the emotional reins of the family. As Isabel described the family dynamics, Amos and Charlotte were especially close, and Amos was deeply concerned and conscientious—but despite his own “difficult year of mental depression in 1934” he was “too overworked and full of responsibility to be able to give the time” to fully realize the extent of Charlotte's illness. Furthermore Amos had a demanding job and a wife and two children. Besides, Isabel wrote to Dana, Amos was “so sensitive and quick to respond emotionally, that he takes things very hard without always working it out mentally.” As for their mother, Isabel wrote, “she understands more than Amos for she knows Charlotte so much better and has seen so much more of her. She knows this is very serious and yet to protect herself she has to shy away from it. And Mother, too, suffers so acutely from worrying over the financial end, that she's got to have C. quickly well to stop that leak.”
²⁶

Dwight Dana tried repeatedly to reassure Isabella and Isabel that they need not worry about “the expense of Charlotte's illness.” The money was available in Thornton's accounts, he said, “and I know that Thornton would want to have no expense spared which might expedite his sister's recovery.”
²⁷
Dr. Rahman and his colleagues assured the Wilders that Charlotte's case was not hopeless, but that she would need at least six more months of hospitalization, and after that, “a sanatarium or quiet country retreat for a very long time.” The doctors were particularly interested in Charlotte “because of her individual case history, and family background of New England clergymen, etc., and no history of mental illness or hereditary insanity.”
²⁸
They hoped as soon as possible to move Charlotte to their “branch in the country, the Westchester division of the New York Hospital at White Plains,” Isabel wrote, because there she would have more privacy and enjoy some freedom to roam outdoors. It would also be good for her to be cared for by new staff and live among new patients who had not seen her in the first throes of her breakdown.
²⁹

 

BY APRIL 1
Thornton had received the news of Charlotte's collapse. “From home, good and bad news,” he wrote to Stein and Toklas from Colombia. “Janet got married and Charlotte had—long deferred—her nervous breakdown.”
³⁰
He urged them to understand “the three volumes between the lines.”
³¹
From various cities in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador he communicated with the family and Dwight Dana by cable and letter, trying to allay his mother's financial worries.

Isabel, in concert with Dana, was also handling literary business on Thornton's behalf while he was in South America. There were overtures about a radio script for the sale of radio rights to
Our Town
(Isabel worked long and hard on a script, but the project did not find a buyer); and inquiries about anthology rights to
The Woman of Andros
and
Heaven's My Destination
(Thornton eventually said yes to
Woman
and no to
Heaven
).
³²
Meanwhile he had to concentrate on the work that was before him.

He made “friends-til-death” everywhere he went. When a copy of the movie of
Our Town
was discovered in “far-off Cartagena” it was “air-posted” to Bogotá, where Wilder and thirty friends watched the film at 11:30 one night in early April. “I spoke. They spoke. We separated at 1:30 with embraces and tears and promises of return,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott.
³³
In a letter to Ruth Gordon he described the landscapes and terrain: “Everywhere mighty peaks . . . eternal snow . . . Cotopaxi . . . Chinborazo . . . El Misti.” In Colombia, a country split by great mountain ranges, “you visit the other cities either in an hour by plane, or in a month by donkey back.” In Peru, which he had visited in his imagination in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
he saw, instead of foot travelers on a bridge, “a handful of Spaniards or almost Spaniards driving Rolls Royces through a myriad Indians.”
³⁴
He wrote to Stein and Toklas that he wished the Inca had won.
³⁵
He pronounced Ecuador the “most beautiful country in the world.”
³⁶

As the journey came to an end, Wilder believed he had “done pretty well” what the State Department had sent him to do. He had lectured in English and in Spanish, given radio interviews, and met people from all walks of life. Two of the writers he met along the way dedicated books to Wilder—the Colombian novelist Fernando González Ochoa and the Brazilian author Erico Verissimo. “I have been made an honorary member of the chief ‘cultural' society in Quito [the Sociedad Jurídico-Literaria], and am first names with all the poets and novelists in sight,” he wrote Stein and Toklas.
³⁷
He hoped that his success in South America would lead to a similar assignment in Europe.
³⁸

At the outset Wilder had made it clear to the sponsors of his trip that he would not write about it. “Writing's only fun when you can tell your truth,” he told Ruth Gordon, “and my truth about these countries is winning, appealing, complex, aching, frustrated, hopeful and dejected.” Nevertheless Wilder wound up writing twenty-one pages advocating measures for better cultural understanding and attacking “the majority of the devices which they [the State Department] are employing as propaganda.”
³⁹
He wrote to Stein, “It was from you I learned that no souls are won by flattery, argumentation or coërcion; that description paints no pictures and that purity is the only propaganda.”
⁴⁰
He might also have given his own ideas credit, for his 1940 journal documents his ongoing ruminations about the dynamics of “Propaganda and Anti-Propaganda.”
⁴¹

Wilder's densely packed schedule in the fall of 1940 and the spring of 1941 apparently accounts for the fact that he stopped writing in his journal in Canada in November 1940 and did not resume until May 23, 1941, in Peru. That day he wrote a “Sketch for a Portrait of Tia Bates”—“for forty years the famous, kind, roaring, strongwilled, childhearted mistress of the best inn on the west coast of South America.” Wilder called her “
tía
,” Spanish for “aunt,” but her first name was Anna. Her husband was a mining engineer, “and she could tell wild stories of gaiety and dangers of the ‘Wild-West' days of early Bolivia and Peru.” She was reported to have “adopted and settled in life” scores, even hundreds of “children abandoned or orphaned by unfortunate gringos; to have ‘set right' financially and morally a host of shipwrecked persons; to have refused payment from a large number of her guests. The Truth is better.”
⁴²
Wilder stored Anna Bates away securely in his journal—the only person he encountered in all his travels in South America to merit such attention—and he filed her in his memory. Twenty years later he would pull her out into the light of day, name her Mrs. Wickersham, make her the proprietor of the best hotel in South America, and set her down in his novel
The Eighth Day.

The last journal passage Wilder had written in November 1940 was titled “On Happy Endings, and the Pessimist.” There, thinking about his play, and the year, he had contemplated the catastrophes of nature, the preponderant “dark” character of human experience, the “pessimism” in Christianity, and the omnipresent knowledge of the brevity of life and the inevitability of death. In that context Wilder found it interesting, he declared, that there are “no great works of literature that assert this pessimism.”
⁴³
If there could be optimism and a happy ending in his play about “the War and the situation of the eternal family under successive catastrophes,” he was determined to find it and express it.
⁴⁴

 

BY EARLY
June he was at home in Hamden, immediately caught up in the efforts to understand and treat Charlotte's condition. To Thornton fell the sobering legal responsibility of signing commitment papers in case his sister would not voluntarily make the recommended move to the Payne Whitney hospital in White Plains—although she agreed to make the change and was moved to Westchester. By this time, Isabella told Amos, Charlotte “is not writing to anybody anymore and no doubt is blaming the family for her detention.”
⁴⁵
She seemed to adjust well enough to her new surroundings, however.
⁴⁶
The hospital director reported that if Charlotte continued to cooperate, she would soon be moved to a convalescent wing and “be able to have her typewriter and papers as she so longs to do.”
⁴⁷

Charlotte periodically underwent standard electric shock therapy, which worked briefly but “did not hold,” and insulin shock therapy, which was not effective.
⁴⁸
She wrote to her mother after one electric shock treatment that she was greatly improved. “If it is sustained I am on the road to recovery and we all certainly hope it is,” Charlotte wrote, adding that she was “shocked” at the expense of her long stay in the hospital. “I can't bear to think how big it must be,” Charlotte told her mother,

 

and however slow I shall have to be to return it, shall always consider it my debt, and pay back in installments. Also I must insure vacations and more conventional living when I next go to New York. I shall put that first—building a career as editorial assistant is something I am experienced in by now—and should charge well for it. I won't ever again go as bohemian as I did; and I wouldn't have if I dreamed it would run me into this charge on the family.
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